High-ranking call quality but low-end everywhere else

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Music and Movies

ZTE's Anthem includes multiple paths and venues for listening to music, including Play Music from Google, a Music Player built-in app, and a large advertisement for Rhapsody on your home screen.

While it depends on personal preference what you go with, the sound is relatively the same for all of them. Which means it comes down to how the music sounds on the phone. With a headset that we provided, the sound was strong and punchy, but with the onboard Dolby Mobile speaker, the sound was distorted at higher volumes.

The same goes for movies as well, and we thought it was a nice touch that Kung Fu Panda 2 comes included on the phone. Although you do have to have a strong connection to "activate" the movie so it will begin playing.

Once it was going, it looked and sounded fine, with a couple of stutters along the way. A slight annoyance, seeing as how we were playing it all of the micro SD card, and not streaming it. The video looked fine on the 4.3-inch screen, although hitting the zoom button actually stretches the image larger, and doesn't simply zoom in.